Swimming pool covers are often used for keeping the water free of trash, to shield the water from sunlight that could degrade protective chemicals in the water and for other purposes. Automatic pool covers are often preferable over manually-operated covers, because the cover can be easily extended when the pool is not in use and retracted during use. In most cases, a pool cover box is located at one end of the pool to hold the cover, motor, winding reel and cable.
FIG. 1 shows a generalized schematic of a swimming pool 10 having a pool deck 12 and coping walls 14 surrounding the pool 10. A pool cover 16 extends from a pool cover assembly 18 in a cover assembly box 20 disposed at one end of the pool 10. A leading edge bar 22 and/or the front edge of the pool cover 16 rides in a track encapsulation 24 along the interior walls of the pool 10. When the pool is not in use, pool cover assembly 18 activates a mechanism (not shown) to pull leading edge bar 22 and cover 16 across the length of swimming pool 10. To make the swimming pool 10 available for use, the cover 16 is retracted by pool cover assembly 18 into the cover assembly box 20 causing leading edge bar 22 to also retract.
Referring to FIG. 2, an abstract view of pool cover assembly 18 is shown. Assembly 18 includes a motor 30, a drive shaft 32 extending from motor 30, a wind-up reel 34 for collecting a rope 36, a gear box 38, and a roll-up tube 40 on which to wind the pool cover 16. Rope 36 extends to a remote pulley system (not shown) and then back to a leading edge of the pool cover 16. Reel 34 and roll-up tube 40 are usually mounted in a free-wheeling fashion on drive shaft 32 to turn independently therefrom. Gear box 38 includes mechanisms to engage either the reel 34 or the roll-up tube 40, depending on whether the pool cover 16 is to be extended or retracted.
The pool cover system shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 is referred to as a right-hand system, since the pool cover motor is located on the right side in the pool cover box. Sometimes the layout of the pool and its surroundings dictate that the pool cover motor be located on the left-hand side of the pool cover box (not shown), referred to as a left-hand system, since the pool cover motor 30 is situated on the left side of the pool cover box. A left-hand system has the same components as the right-hand system shown in FIG. 2, arranged in a mirror-image from that shown in FIG. 2.
Prior art pool cover assemblies were typically permanently mounted with bolts to brackets on the walls and/or to supports on the floor of a pool cover box. To service or replace a component of the pool cover assembly, such as a motor or gear-box, the component had to be unbolted and detached from the brackets and supports, as well as from the other components. To clean leaves and debris from a pool cover box, it was preferable to remove the entire pool cover assembly. However, because of the difficulty in doing so, such cleaning was limited to what could be done without removal of the pool cover assembly.